Counting on successful parliamentary elections as an affirmation of the costly American mission in Iraq, President Bush on Wednesday mounted his most comprehensive argument for continuing military involvement as well as a pointed rebuttal for critics of the war.
The Iraqi elections represent another “milestone” in Bush’s campaign for the establishment of a stable democracy in Iraq, which has replaced the rationale of finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction that had served as justification for the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
American forces will not withdraw from Iraq, Bush said, until they have completed that “mission,” vowing that a premature troop withdrawal “is not going to happen on my watch.”
Yet Democratic critics of the war, while praising the elections in Iraq on Thursday as well as the courage of the American forces supporting them, continue to fault Bush for not charting a specific course for troop withdrawal.
The American mission will be completed with establishment of a firm democratic government in Iraq–“the only constitutional democracy in the Arab world”–with forces sufficient to withstand the assaults of a violent insurgency, Bush said.
“I make this pledge to the families of the fallen: We will carry on the fight, we will complete their mission and we will win,” Bush told an audience of diplomats, members of his Cabinet and foreign policy scholars in Washington.
His address, framed like the closing argument of a court case, capped a three-week series of four speeches that the president has delivered since unveiling a published “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” at the U.S. Naval Academy. He was seeking, he said, to explain “why we went into Iraq, why we stayed in Iraq and why we cannot–and will not–leave Iraq until victory is achieved.”
However, as the House Democratic leader and other Democrats call for a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces, Democrats continued to criticize Bush for lacking a well-defined strategy for success.
“While the president has now given four speeches . . . the American public, the Iraqi people and our brave troops still don’t have any clarity about the U.S. military mission in Iraq,” said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.). Feingold opposed the invasion and has proposed a deadline for withdrawal of U.S. forces at the end of 2006.
`Transition’ year
In a letter to the president, 41 Democratic senators urged Bush to make 2006 a “transition” year in Iraq–“creating the conditions for the phased redeployment of United States forces.”
“While we appreciate your recent speeches on this issue,” the senators told the president in their letter, “we regret that the American people have still not been presented with a plan that identifies the remaining political, economic and military benchmarks that must be met and a reasonable schedule to achieve them.”
Yet Iraqi elections that started with voting for a temporary parliament in January, continued with approval of a constitution in October and now will seat a permanent 275-member parliament are central to the political success that Bush has outlined in his strategy. And “in spite of the violence,” the president said, “Iraqis have met every milestone.”
`Chaos for the cameras’
Successful voting in Iraq also has been followed by periods of intensive violence, and the president has cautioned Americans to expect nothing less this time. Insurgents cannot achieve a military victory, he said, so they rely instead on “chaos for the cameras” to shake the resolve of the American public.
Bush’s addresses are the spearhead of a campaign by the White House to confront criticism that the administration has no exit strategy for the nearly 3-year-old conflict that has claimed the lives of at least 2,150 Americans and an estimated 30,000 Iraqis.
American public sentiment has turned against the war, with opinion polls indicating that most Americans now consider the war a mistake. But fewer support an immediate withdrawal, with 58 percent telling the Pew Research Center in a recent survey that terrorist groups will gain strength if the U.S. withdraws soon. That Dec. 7-11 Pew survey of 1,502 adults also showed virtually no improvement in Bush’s job rating, with 38 percent approving, up slightly from 36 percent in November.
The president acknowledged Wednesday, as he has before, that prewar intelligence asserting that Saddam Hussein posed a threat with weapons of mass destruction was “wrong.” But Bush said the conflict has become the “central front” in a war with terrorists intent on creating a base to attack the West and in the Middle East.
Bush returned to a long-stated contention that he has learned the lessons of the terrorist assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, and that Hussein posed a threat to world security with or without the weapons he supposedly possessed. In a post-9/11 world, the president said to applause, “if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”
Any suggestion that the administration “manipulated” intelligence to justify the invasion, Bush said, is politically motivated, coming from members of Congress “who saw the same intelligence we saw” in voting to approve use of force in 2002.
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mdsilva@tribune.com
